A biblioteca secreta

Lavinia certainly hadn't forgotten about the secret library, known to her simply as a nosa biblioteca, 'our library'. However, she hadn't been able to return for several weeks. One reason was that she had been drawn by numerous threads of her research on Ruth Matilda Anderson, the photographer who had traveled to Galicia five times before the Spanish Civil War. She'd given up on tracing all of Ruth's routes, but had gone to a number of villages, towns, and cities. That had not been either a fruitful or a satisfying endeavor. She guessed the despair she'd felt was less due to the inability to locate the exact routes that existed during Ruth's time and more to the realization that contemporary life had destroyed the landscape in many regions. In addition, either nobody knew the old crafts or artesanías or the objects that once were easy to find and photograph had for the most part been relegated to museums.

"Why am I doing this?" Lavinia asked herself, not wanting to hear her own answer. "Is this just an exercise in academic arrogance? Does doing this satisfy a need to see my name in print under a title in some journal?" She knew her interest was waning and that her once-enthusiastic attitude toward the project was in serious jeopardy. Unfortunately, there was nothing to replace her research, as far as she could see. As much as she wanted to stay in Galicia, she had nothing to justify continuing to travel around the four provinces, then returning to the Compostela she considered to be her home away from home. Even that feeling toward the city seemed trite to her and she realized she was beginning to doubt the feeling that had led her to remain there longer than originally planned. 

It isn't unusual for travelers to feel this way after the initial 'enchantment' of the new wears off. We start to find flaws in the new life and homesickness starts to seep into our thoughts when we become impatient at the way people around us do things or think. We thought we were comfortable and even felt proud of how well we'd been adapting, which for some of us included learning the language, but then things start to get ragged around the edges and, as one writer said, things fall apart. The center, Lavinia realized, was not going to hold. 

The thought terrified her.

While she was puzzling over the desire to work through the uncertainty and the need to leave everything and fly home, a place she didn't really feel attached to any longer, she decided to return to the beloved stones of the casco vello and walk. Just walk, letting the conflict and questions drift against the old stones. She didn't know what else to do, and felt very lost. That feeling was made even worse, since the streets were so familiar to her at this point that she couldn't actually get lost, no matter how much she tried. 

It didn't occur to Lavinia, at least not at that moment, to talk about her misgivings with anybody. That wasn't due to a sense of independence, but rather to an inability to articulate her thoughts. That, and something akin to embarrassment. Admitting to feeling homesick was not the problem. Instead, she was reluctant to hurt the feelings of the people who had made her feel so comfortable over the months, people who had offered her friendship in ways she'd never experienced back home. 

Home? Where was that anyway? 

And so she found herself sitting at a small metal table not far from the Praza de Cervantes and hoping that people walking by would not take her as one of the horrendous horde of tourists that were now invading Compostela twelve months of the year, rain or shine. She wanted nothing to do with them, yet knew she could never pass as a Galician. It was a bit ironic that she could dress in a manner that led observers to question whether she was male or female, but she was unable to pass as a person born in that part of the world. Maybe that was part of what she was feeling now - that she would always be a foreigner, an outsider, no matter how well she came to speak the language, no matter how many sites around the four provinces she visited and could talk about with local residents. She would never belong. Maybe if she'd come as a young girl and grown up in Compostela she could belong, but she hadn't. 

"What are you doing here? Weren't you supposed to go to Negreira and Pontemaceira today?" 

Lavinia was startled by her friend Pilar's voice near her left shoulder as she contemplated the side view of the San Paio convent. "Are you all right?" Pilar asked, looking concerned.

"No, I've decided to go tomorrow. I needed to do something here today." Lavinia was unable to say why she had really put off the short trip out of town. She wasn't sure she wanted to go anywhere now, at least not until she had sorted out what she needed to do. Pilar nodded as if she understood, and perhaps she did. Without asking if it was all right, she sat down at the little table and caught the busy waiter's attention, requesting a green tea with lemon. It was a bit unusual for her to order tea, since Lavinia had always known her to drink coffee.

"I have something for you," said Pilar, and drew an envelope from her bag, using some caution as she did. It gave her companion the impression that the envelope held something delicate, or at least important. Pilar checked the table to make sure it was free of grease from previous customers who might have consumed chips or olives with their drinks. The table was clean, and she laid the envelope on it.

"What's that?" asked Lavinia, knowing Pilar's knack for appearing at the right time with the right plan. This time, she had no idea what that plan consisted of, but she was ready to listen. At least it could distract her from her thoughts, which had been growing increasingly dark.

"I found this in a book.." 'This' referred to the contents of the manila envelope, of course. There was nothing else on the table except the two cups with their saucers. She continued.

"I was in the library, looking at some materials, when I found these and thought of you." Pilar had switched from singular to plural, which was confusing to Lavinia, but she continued to listen, attentively. She also did not ask which library Pilar had been in when she had come across the items that she had placed in the envelope. Had anybody else but Pilar come along unexpectedly, Lavinia would have assumed the library was the main one associated with the university; Pilar, however, was intimately involved with a nosa biblioteca, the one that only a select group of women knew about still. The fact that she was referring to it now was immediately of interest to Lavinia, who had assumed she was no longer a part of the effort to find a space big enough and safe enough to house it. After all, she had told herself as time went on and the silence regarding the library had grown louder, she was a foreigner. But her companion was explaining what she had brought:

"Have you ever heard of the Bibliotheca Thysiana?" Pilar was asking.

"I don't think so." Lavinia was ashamed to admit her ignorance.

"Not that many people have," was the response. "It's in Leiden and was established in the seventeenth century by Johannes Thysius. Thysius was a legal expert and died rather young, in 1653. His will created the library, which has around 2,500 books. Not that many people know about it or have consulted its holdings, but it's definitely important. And one of its books turned out to contain very interesting items. There were recycled scraps of paper in its binding. They seem to have been used to form boards for the covers. Even Thysius probably didn't know what was inside the book, which was published in 1577."

"What does that have to do with Galicia?" Lavinia thought, but didn't say it. Pilar continued, however:

"You're probably wondering what the connection is to 'our library' and my point is that while organizing some of the holdings - cataloguing is still taking place - I discovered something similar." She paused, and Lavinia realized that the silence that had led her to think they weren't interested in her assistance was actually due to the process of getting the books ready to be moved to a new space. Pilar continued:

"I found something similar in one of our books and it could be another case of a bookbinder using scraps of paper to bind volumes. On the other hand, the items I found are not the same as those in the library in Leiden. In the Dutch case, the pieces of paper were fragments of daily life, notes of various sorts, written requests, things that had been communicated in writing and then thrown away, to be fished out of a bin and reused. They weren't intended to be read after they'd served their purpose."

Lavinia waited for her friend to go on.

"I suspect there are more volumes with hidden papers of this sort. But the things I found were bound up deliberately, in order to protect them."

"What do you mean?" Lavinia was desperate to understand Pilar's reasoning, almost as much as she was to see what the contents of the envelope were.

"What I found are not scraps of pages, nor notes asking someone to run an errand."

"Then what are they?" Lavinia was growing anxious. She had to know.

"There are accounts of events from medieval times - so far from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries - regarding prostitution. They include names and ranks of men who used the service, the names of a number of women, whether they bore any children, health care provided to them, the places they worked, things like that. There are things written by women to describe their work in great detail, some with humor, others with disdain, others with rage."

"But why do you say these papers were deliberately bound into books that are in a nosa biblioteca?" It wasn't clear yet how Pilar knew this.

"Because many of them say they are testimonies and other accounts of the way in which prostitution was carried out and that, because they provided details, especially those like the clients' names and any offspring, they had to remain secret. This is clearly stated on some of the papers."

"So there is a lot to be learned about Compostela's history through these items, of course." Lavinia did say this aloud.

"Yes, and we know the way to hide the declarations was to insert them in bindings that could be taken apart while leaving the content of the papers intact. This is a case of women's history, composed by women and signed by them. Holes were made deliberately in the binding so that purchasers and readers might recognize what was hidden there and release the information. If you know what to look for, you can find the bindings that contain all that information and open them."

Lavinia was stunned. This was potentially a source of information that had rarely been encountered. The next thing she heard was:

"We have a lot of work to do. We need to inspect all the books, starting with the earliest ones and the most fragile. This practice lasted for several centuries and our library is the first one to find examples of it! This will help us gain support, too. We need that if we are to become a public library in a public space. Our holdings will become invaluable, because there's a strong possibility there will be books with other sorts of information."

Lavinia didn't know if Pilar was correct in this, but most likely she was.

"Would you like to come to the library to see for yourself and help us go through the sections of older books?"

Lavinia was on her feet, ready to go. Wild horses couldn't stop her, nor could doubts as to where she needed to be. She needed to be here, in Compostela. Helping to recover a history that needed to be told.